Sons of the Father: George Washington and His Protégés

George Washington’s Mentors

Young people have always needed older ones to guide them, but if some kindly soul had taken George Washington aside at age sixteen and told him how much he would benefit from having a good “mentor,” he wouldn’t have had a clue what that person was talking about. At least according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest recorded use of the word, in the sense of “a person who acts as guide and adviser to another person, esp. one who is younger and less experienced [or] . . . more generally , a person who offers support and guidance to another; an experienced and trusted counsellor or friend; a patron, a sponsor,” came only in 1750, in Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son. If the word itself would have baffled the young Washington, however, we can be sure that he would have grasped the concept immediately, because he, like all his contemporaries, so thoroughly understood patronage. Patronage was woven into the very fabric of Virginia life, albeit in a form that might or might not carry the avuncular connotations of mentorship. An eighteenth-century patron, the OED tells us, was “a person standing in a role of oversight, protection, or sponsorship to another; a man of status or distinction who gives protection and aid to another person in return for deference and certain services.” In the stylized language of the day, patrons and their dependents often referred to each another as friends, but the affection we see as fundamental to friendship did not necessarily figure in a fundamentally unequal relationship. What was essential, that the patron give “protection and aid to another person in return for deference and certain services,” defined the role of the client; and the client was simply a “hanger-on.” A client enjoyed a protected position, but George Washington’s Mentors Fred Anderson 22 Fred Anderson it would also be a galling one for an ambitious youth like the teenaged Washington : it was a status to be endured because the only path to becoming what he most wanted most to be, a gentleman, ran though thickets of dependency that modern Americans would find bewildering, dense, and oppressive.1 Patron-client relationships, and the “sponsored social mobility” that went with them, were central to life in a monarchical culture. They were above all a means of demonstrating and reinforcing the status of the patron, managing upward social mobility in a generational context, and harnessing individual ambition to socially useful purposes while controlling its potentially destructive negative effects. The proper channeling of ambition in particular was crucial to preserve hierarchy, reinforce deference, and prevent the kind of disruptions that would come to be associated with the self-made men of the nineteenth century. Above all, the restraint on ambition was necessary in Virginia , where weak, decentralized governing institutions and a rudimentary educational system coexisted with an honor culture that—within the gentry, at least—placed few restraints on masculine aggression and economic selfaggrandizement . To become a Virginia gentleman, and ultimately to be in a position to assert one’s leadership among the gentry, a young man had first to learn how to defer to the older men who would vouch for him—who would, as it was said, “give him a character”—and would introduce him to the wider world of honor and offices.2 Ordinarily, a man’s first patron was his father, a crucial link between the son and the larger world of social superiors, influence, and power, and the man from whom he learned his first critical lessons in deference. Washington of course was critically disadvantaged in this by the death of his father, Augustine, in 1743, when he was only eleven years old. The fact that his formidable mother, Mary Ball Washington, chose not to remarry made his situation unusually complex, and difficult. His half brother Lawrence did his best to take on a fatherly role, and to some extent did so, but found himself thwarted, at least early on, by Mary’s opposition. Lawrence’s patronage connections were solid ones, but did not run directly into the Virginia planter elite so much as around it, into the circle of officers whom the Crown sent to govern Virginia and to defend the empire. His appointment as captain in Gooch’s American Foot, the regiment raised by Lieutenant Governor William Gooch in 1740 for the Cartagena expedition, had signified the beginning of a durable tie of influence that extended both to the expedition’s army commander...